Category Archives: Unhappy leadership stats

As if the reports and suspicions weren’t bad enough, the reality points to a problem even more pervasive than people thought. I’m going to quote from the childprotectionguide.org website, with some added thoughts of my own in italics along the way. (The article I’m linking to here has the source information for this study.)

“About 4 percent of Catholic priests have been accused of sexually abusing minors over the past half-century, according to a draft of the first comprehensive study of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in the United States. The percentage is higher than many people, including church officials, had anticipated.

“The draft of the study, done by John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, found that 4,450 of the 110,000 priests who served between 1950 and 2002 were accused of sexual abuse of minors, according to CNN, which reported that it had reviewed the draft.

“The number of alleged perpetrators given in the draft study is higher than the tallies by news media outlets, including the Associated Press and The New York Times, which have tried to count reported allegations nationwide.

“The number is also higher than that projected by church officials. Pope Benedict XVI, who at the time was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said in 2002, according to the Catholic News Service: “In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type.”

“The annual accusation rate against Catholic priests peaked at nearly 9 per 1,000 in 1980. However, since the reports, Table 1.1, are generally made after the victims become adults, with most of the reports coming after 1990, this could mean that abuse that occurred in the late eighties and in the nineties has just not yet been reported.” (In other words, we may not be hearing the last of this … we may be coming up to another rash of abuse reports and lawsuits — a second wave.)

“Roughly 1/4 of the pedophile priests abused girls, although they have gotten less attention. In fact, both SAVE and SNAP were founded by women who were sexually abused by Catholic priests as young girls.”

“It’s not just Catholic priests. There have been offenders who were spiritual leaders of many various groups, as diverse as Buddhist monks and Jewish rabbis. According to reformation.com 838 ministers from major Protestant denominations have sexually assaulted children. The website quotes the Right Reverend William Persell, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago as saying “We would be naïve and dishonest were we to say this is a Roman Catholic problem and has nothing to do with us because we have married and female priests in our church. Sin and abusive behavior know no ecclesial or other boundaries.'”

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago recently published results of their recent study, exploring “satisfaction and happiness among American workers.” They found that clergy scored highest on both counts: 87% said they were “very satisfied” with their jobs, and 67% said they were “very happy” with life in general. What?

A growing challenge in many denominations is finding enough pastors to serve the churches that are vacant. More people are leaving the ministry ranks (through resignation or retirement) than are joining them. In my own denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, plans to start new churches are repeatedly scaled back because we can’t find enough qualified pastors to start these new churches. Our denomination is having a hard enough time finding enough pastors to fill vacant churches, let alone finding pastors to start new ones. Why the shortage of ministers?

Several years ago, consultants Alan and Cheryl Klaas were hired by the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) to investigate this issue. They were tasked to find the root causes of the clergy shortage that many denominations are facing. The problem they uncovered was unexpected (to them) and troubling. The reason for the drop-off of new ministry recruits matched the reason for an increase in people leaving ministry: the conflict, criticism, and ill-treatment that has become an all-too-common aspect of ministry life. What follows is an excerpt of an article in the Baptist standard:

“[This research study] was intended to be a traditional recruitment and retention study,” Klaas said. For example, he thought he’d be recommending changes on issues like seminary communication with potential students.

“We wondered if students got good services, if seminaries were recruiting the right people,” he explained. But in the end, the Klaases concluded the problems are 20 percent institutional and 80 percent behavioral.

“The fundamental finding is that people beating on each other is the main issue,” Klaas said.

One telling statistic from the Klaas study is the decrease in the numbers of pastors’ kids who become pastors themselves. Klaas estimates that pastors’ children made up about 40 percent of seminarians in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s a much different picture now at the two seminaries in the denomination Klaas was working with. Last year, pastors’ children made up only 5 percent of seminarians at one and 17 percent at the other.

The bottom line is that churches need to do a better job at caring for and supporting their pastors. Another way of looking at it — from the vantage point of the pastors themselves — is to say that pastors need to do a better job of caring for and supporting themselves (through training, taking time off, participating in support groups, etc.). Instead of sitting back and hoping that the church will do it for you, create a plan and insist on the church’s support for you to take the steps you need to care for your physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened in my case, had I done this. I tried to do it, but was not clear enough about what I needed, or insistent about getting the funding to get help. To be honest, I don’t think I really understood what I needed or how badly I needed it until it was too late. Don’t make that mistake.

This past Sunday, if the trends were consistent, 350 churches around the country were informed that their pastor had resigned or been fired. This figure comes from a variety of sources, one of which is research done by Focus on the Family. Here’s an excerpt from a letter written by James Dobson.

“Thousands of spiritual leaders are barely hanging on from day to day. Our surveys indicated that 80 percent of pastors and 84 percent of their spouses are discouraged or are dealing with depression. More than 40 percent of pastors and 47 percent of their spouses report that they are suffering from burnout, frantic schedules and unrealistic expectations. We estimate that approximately 1,500 pastors leave their assignments each month, due to moral failure, spiritual burnout or contention within their local congregations.”

Did you catch that: 80 percent of pastors and 84 percent of their spouses are discouraged or dealing with depression! That should tell us something. Peter Drucker, the late leadership guru, once said that the four hardest jobs in America (and not necessarily in order, he added) are the president of the United States, a university president, a CEO of a hospital and … a pastor.

It’s been 15 months since I took my leave of absence from my senior pastor position. I am now serving as a pastor with a special call to work with other leaders in recovery from sexual addiction. I am still often struck by how stressed-out and unhappy I was in my years as a senior pastor. My experience in recovery has shown me that this unhappiness and stress was not primarily the byproduct of the losing battle with porn I was fighting at the time. The shame and struggle of not living in integrity were a big deal, but even without those, I came to realize that life as a pastor was not going to work for me.

Turns out I’m not alone. I keep running into former pastors who left the ministry for one reason or another, and current pastors who are struggling mightily to keep their heads above water, and their souls from shriveling. There’s something about about the way we “do church,” and/or the way pastors “do ministry” that creates dysfunction. There’s something about the expectations people have for pastors – and pastors have for themselves – that keeps them isolated, because they feel pressured to keep up the facade of having it all together.

Granted, there are many ministers out there who are doing really well, and finding fulfillment and joy in their work. God bless them. But the dirty little secret of Christendom is that many pastors are not doing well, and they are getting judgment and criticism instead of help. The more I think about this, the more sad and angry I get.

A shocking statistic of Jimmy Lee Draper, former president of Lifeways Ministries, is that for every 20 people who go into the pastorate only one retires from the ministry. Pastors donâ€™t make it to retirement because they are either burned out, fired, have a moral breakdown or just quit. I donâ€™t know of any other profession where there is a 95 percent drop-off rate! (M.B. note: pastors view their work as a call from God, not “just a job,” so this high attrition rate is especially telling.)

Pastors need encouragement (statistics in the articles sidebar demonstrate why). And if no one in the church is assigned to nurture, affirm and prevent burnout for the pastor, then no one will. When they get in trouble, who can they turn to?

What do people do when they face ongoing struggles and frustrations, and don’t have outlets where they can talk about it? They get into trouble in all kinds of ways, hurting themselves, their families, and their churches. We need to do a better job of protecting and caring for our pastors.

Let’s be honest about this: churches don’t know how to care for their leaders, and leaders are profoundly uncomfortable showing their vulnerability to their followers and appearing to be “needy.” In light of this, what needs to happen is that churches encourage (and fund) their pastors’ efforts to establish a network of accountability and support for themselves. More about that later.

I say elsewhere on this site that The emotional and spiritual health of leaders in churches today is dangerously low, and the stresses and temptations they are facing is dangerously high. You don’t have to look far to find stats to back that up. Here are some, gleaned from articles by Darrin Patrick and Mark Driscoll:

1500 pastors leave ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches. This means that every hour of the traditional work week, almost 9 pastors somewhere are leaving their ministry post.

80% of pastors and 84% percent of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastors.

50% of pastors – so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.

80% of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry – leave the ministry within the first five years.

70% of pastors fight depression.

Almost 40% of pastors said they have had an extra-marital affair since beginning their ministry.

50% of pastors’ marriages will end in divorce.

80% of pastors’ spouses wish their spouse would choose another profession.

The majority of pastor’s wives surveyed said that the most destructive event that occurred in their marriage and family was the day they entered the ministry.